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The psalms of the Old Testament remain the prayer of the New. By their bringing together and by their lyrical exaltation of all the clearly marked themes included in revelation from the beginning, the psalms are the providential means to aid us in discerning the abiding reality of the Word.

The Bible and the Gospel, by Louis Bouyer (356 pages, Cluny Media)

The Word of God did not make itself heard little by little by the addition of truth to truth, going from the simple to the complex, from the elementary and concrete to the elaborated and abstract. The development of revelation in the Bible appears to be more like that of a theme which enriches itself by continuously taking on new harmonies, to the point where it finally takes possession of our whole mental and spiritual universe. The Word of God progresses not so much in the sense of complex propositions that are multiplied and become more and more diverse, than in the sense of a unity that is discovered between a divine personality and a divine design. And this design is wholly concerned with union between God and man, with the reuniting of humanity, dismembered by sin but reconstituted in its second Adam.

To understand revelation, the meaning of Scripture, requires that we read it in this way. That is to say, we must seek in it, not a succession of concepts, but the deepening of truths, very simple and very rich, which were given from the beginning and make up the unity of the divine Word. And what allows us to achieve this properly religious understanding of the Scriptures is a contemplation of the great design set forth in them and of the One whose face is found therein.

This contemplation is constantly aroused in the Church by inspired prayer, by the Psalter which establishes the foundation of all liturgical prayer. If we are astonished that the psalms of the Old Testament remain the prayer of the New, it is precisely because we have not grasped the true character of the progress of revelation. By their bringing together and by their lyrical exaltation of all the clearly marked themes included in revelation from the beginning, the psalms, on the contrary, are the providential means to aid us in discerning, under its first realizations, the abiding reality of the Word.

The themes of the Gospel that are most properly new—our adoption by the Father, the gift of the Spirit, as well as the revelation of the Son—do not receive their full meaning, do not even become intelligible, until we discover them at the confluence of the themes of the prophetic word. Justice and mercy as preached by Amos and Hosea, Isaiah’s notion of divine holiness, the religion of the heart proclaimed by Jeremiah, redemptive suffering as found in the Servant Songs, the divine Presence eternally given to a regenerated people as Ezekiel contemplates it, and finally, the mystery of a Wisdom that is creative and redemptive, as perceived by the scribes: these are all the threads from which the fabric of the Gospel is woven. They all assemble around the One presented to us not only as the Messiah, the Son of David, but as the heavenly Son of man come to carry out the judgment and to establish the Kingdom of Yahweh, as the faithful Servant, expiating sin by His innocent suffering.

The theology that the rabbinic tradition, at the time of its full vitality, drew from the Bible appears as if illuminated by the radiant focus of the shekinah, that is to say, of that Presence of God coming down among men in the shining cloud to “pitch its tent” among them (this is the meaning of the root shakhan). And the mysticism of the same rabbis is tense with the loving desire to be carried away in return like Elijah, after the fiery chariot of the merkabah, taking man up to the heaven where this God lives who dwells in a house “not made by human hands” (cf. Acts 7:48; 17:24; 2 Corinthians 5:1). And how does St. John describe the Incarnation, except precisely by applying to the Word made flesh this theme of the shekinah: and the Word “pitched his tent” among us? The verb ἐσκήνωσεν that he employs is not only the translation of shakhan, but is its literal transcription: the root consonants are the same. And life, taken up in Christ and with Christ, taken up to the divine presence, which is the whole of St. Paul’s Gospel—what is this but the flowering of the Jewish mysticism corresponding to Jewish theology? The descent of God to man, to make Himself “a pilgrim and traveler” with him, so as then to raise him with Christ, in Christ, to that heavenly sanctuary where Jesus has made Himself our forerunner—this is the summary of Christian faith and spirituality. But these were already the ultimate perspectives on which the vision of Israel was fixed. 

In short, what is this Kingdom to which the advent and the work of Jesus introduce us, except the very one in which Daniel and the apocalyptic texts have condensed the hope of the children of Abraham?

The fact that the prayer of Israel has become, as if spontaneously and effortlessly, the prayer of the Church, simply witnesses to this continuity which the whole Bible should help us to grasp. To speak thus is in no way to ignore or to underestimate the irreducible newness of the Gospel. But we have perceived precisely nothing of the movement that penetrates and progressively uplifts the whole Bible of Israel, if we do not see it wholly illuminated by the promise, tense with expectation: the promise, the expectation of the divine Kingdom, of the divine theophany from which the Kingdom is inseparable, and at the same time of that recreation of man, beginning with his heart, which must accompany both, and of which the first creation was only the sketch. Is this not what is expressed by one of the latter prophets when he says: 

Behold, I am doing a new thing; 

Now it springs forth, do you not perceive it?
(Isaiah 43:19)

In this way, when we come to the end of the Old Covenant, everything is ready to welcome the New. But, inversely, in order that its “Good News,” that is, its Gospel, be received, there must be hearts that are prepared, souls that are souls of desire, whose desire is that of the Spirit. It is the Old Testament that constitutes this preparation. It is the psalms that translate this desire. They are, therefore, rightly the Christian prayer, because they are the prayer by which the Spirit has taught us to ask exactly what the Father wishes to give through in His Son.

However, if we do not wish these statements to remain mere sentiment, we are obliged to consider a problem that seems to be disturbing the consciousness of Christians today. This problem, in fact, arises as soon as we go back to the Bible, in the state of mind that is ours today, to seek there a source, a source of life. What is the exegesis, the interpretation of the Scriptures, we ask ourselves, that will assist us? Should it be a symbolic, allegorical exegesis, that relies on the tradition of the great spiritual writers of the past and is wholly permeated with religious meaning, with Christian meaning more exactly, but indifferent to the quarrels of experts and concerned only with the interior life? Or should it be a literal, scientific exegesis that relies on all the modern resources of philology and archeology and that is animated by a critical sensibility and concerned exclusively with historical and objective truth? 

Everything hinges on knowing what is the true religious meaning of the Bible—what does it signify as the Word of God? Is it the meaning that makes it speak of Christ throughout when it is submitted to an interpretative framework desiring to see in it nothing but symbol? Is it what the letter of the text says, often apart from any connection to the specific content of the Gospel? When these questions are asked in this form, once we have answered yes to one of them, it is then clear that there is no way of saying yes to the other. A compromise will be useless. It will end only in reading the Bible with insecurity and doubt, with the feeling that its religious meaning is not authentic and that its authentic meaning is not religious. 

If we wish to retain what is true in both these positions, we must begin by categorically rejecting the premises of both. The only true exegesis of the Bible that takes it as the Word of God is neither a doubtfully symbolic exegesis, built up arbitrarily on the texts without taking account of their own demands, nor an allegedly scientific exegesis, desirous of isolating and fixing each phase of its history while refusing a priori ever to consider its unity. Christian exegesis, on the contrary, the exegesis that is truly theological, begins with the unity of the Word of God which the Church alone keeps forever alive in her Tradition. But it does not, for all that, exclude critical methods nor the more solid results that they have gained. Rightly understood, these can only aid us to find throughout the Bible the continuity of the same design of salvation and redemption.2

Christian exegesis does not, then, confuse the Old Testa­ment with the New. But neither does it separate them. It perceives a certain symbolism in Scripture, but this is in no way an artificial symbolism, a veneer taken from some material outside the text itself. It is the spontaneous symbolism of a development of religious realities and ideas. It does nothing but progressively reveal possibilities not immediately apparent, which only the creative continuity of divine action in history could bring out. Because of this, such exegesis will, therefore, be even more historical than the exegesis which desires, under pretext of critical science, to remain a stranger to the vision of history given by the Gospel. If this were not the case, we would be reduced to denying that this vision is true. On the contrary, if the Gospel is true, then without the perspectives that it offers to us, we shall never attain true history in the depth of its creative unity. Without it, we will never go beyond a pulverized superficiality, a cold and crumbled crust.

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The featured image is Holy Trinity (from 1425 until 1427) by Andrei Rublev, and is in the public domain, courtesy of Wikimedia Commons.

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